On loan verb formation in Asia Minor Greek

old_uid13708
titleOn loan verb formation in Asia Minor Greek
start_date2014/03/28
schedule14h
onlineno
detailsThème de la séance : Morphologie
summaryThe purpose of this presentation is to investigate verb borrowing in a language-contact situation involving dialectal variation. I argue that the accommodation of non-native verbs in a recipient language is not only the product of extra-linguistic factors (e.g. degree of bilingualism, Thomason 2001, Matras 2009, Wichmann & Wohlgemuth 2008) but follows specific linguistic constraints. In order to illustrate arguments and proposals, I draw evidence from the Asia Minor dialect of Kydonies (Aivaliot, Sakkaris 1940) that has been affected by Turkish, where borrowed verbs are loanblends consisting of a borrowed and a native part: the stem comes from Turkish, where the inflectional ending and the verbal suffix (between hyphens) are Greek: Turkish -> Aivaliot kazanmak kazad-iz-u / kazad-o ‘to profit’ By examining the integration of Turkish verbs in Aivaliot, I deal with certain crucial aspects of Greek morphology that have conditioned the form of these verbs, such as the property of Greek word-formation to be stem-based and the important role of stem allomorphy which determines the borrowing strategy. I conclude that it is possible for a language (in this case, the Indo-European fusional Greek) to be affected by a linguistic system of distinct origin and typology (the Altaic agglutinative Turkish) provided that certain morphological conditions are met. I also demonstrate that the study of dialects offers new challenges to morphology, since dialects provide information that can shed light on crucial issues regarding word formation in general.
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